MSM Diversity

This is kind of outdated, but this website from the era of Susan Estrich’s beef with Michael Kinsley over women’s representation in the LA Times opinion section has some data on gender diversity in the MSM that seems to me to suggest that the blogosphere is probably somewhat less skewed. Of course, the total number of people with elite op-ed columns gigs is so small that minor changes make a big difference. Thanks to Gail Collins’ addition to the roster The New York Times has now doubled the number of women with regular columns on the op-ed page. Seven of the Eight Elect are white, but one African-American columnist out of eight actually means that blacks are slightly overrepresented relative to their share of the population.

The Post op-ed roster is more confusing but seems to include a smaller proportion of women and blacks than does the Times. Neither paper includes any Hispanic columnists.

UPDATE: Jane Hamsher looks more closely at the blogosphere and sees many more women in top positions than Ellen Goodman found. It occurred to me that I don’t actually have any idea how many of the DailyKos frontpagers are women. McJoan is and MissLaura is, but it just occurred to me that I’d kind of been assuming that “BarbinMD” is a woman because “Barbin” sounds like “Barbara” and Barbara is a woman’s name even though, obviously, that line of reasoning doesn’t make any sense. You can, of course, look it up and it turns out that BarbinMD actually is a woman named Barbara. I don’t, however, actually make a habit of looking up the “real” names being people’s pseudonyms.